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Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…defended the country’s anti-gay laws as “merely an effort to prevent the efforts of gay groups to ‘persuade this society by manipulation or dishonest political campaigning.’” Chaplin sees nothing wrong with the church and state speaking together with one voice. “The idea of an inevitable conflict between the church and the state is a peculiarity of Western civilization,” he says. “For the Orthodox civilization and way of life, as well as Islamic c…

New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

By Chrissy Stroop

…d, it’s concerning that only 41% of Americans would be somewhat or very comfortable learning that a friend is transgender, while a full third are willing to tell pollsters this would make them uncomfortable. I hope that PRRI and other research institutions and polling organizations will continue to ask questions like this one in subsequent years so that we can see whether Americans’ self-reported feelings about having transgender friends track wit…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…on as the South…and it is time for conservatives every where to unite in efforts to suppress and extinguish it.” — George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, 1857 “Conservative” is a misnomer. The term obscures the fact that those identified as conservatives have varied more widely in views on national debt, religion, military excursions, the personal conduct of elected officials, political party affiliation and other putative con…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…ave asserted the Christianity of Mormon belief for national audiences, the number one reaction has come from Christians who seek to correct my understanding of my faith and remind me that Mormons are not, in their eyes, Christians. Some assert that they’ll be praying for my mistaken soul (and the soul of my Jewish husband too). Others seek to engage in a friendlier conversational exchange about whether Mormons profess the Nicene Creed. (We do not…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…say, as he does over and over, that anyone who cares to devote time and effort to understanding evolution can do it. As difficult as it can be, science is, in a very real sense, right there on the page. In fact, in the end there is nothing for it but to be out in the open, to be seen, to be comprehended. This is one of the great joys of science. Though it has its own joys, theology does not operate this way. Religion does not make sense as a set…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ouse, and his colleague, Rob Tisinai, gives a better breakdown of what the numbers really mean—and it isn’t a rousing success story about “change.” “Out of 98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexual feelings or become a bit more bi. And possibly none who turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do n…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…han reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any number of manifestations, from a community like Iona to the shelves of New Age bookstores. Bradley argues that although the idea of a historical Celtic Church may be an exercise in “wishful thinking, romantic nostalgia and the projection of all kinds of dreams about what should and might be,” it’s also a “vehicle through which people have chased their dreams… of deeper spir…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…notion that pregnancy is not an illness draws, I daresay uneasily, from a number of sources. There’s the classical notion that a thing’s nature is derived from its purpose, and the purpose of female bodies is to bear children. There’s the persistent early modern fear that women, especially privileged white women, are becoming overcivilized and unnatural, not having as many privileged white babies, relying on technology and pain relief, and not fi…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…and the Chicago Picasso is indeed familiar—but no less strange than it was forty-four years ago. What does this mysterious sculpture depict? Popular answers include: an aardvark, a bird, an Afghan hound, and one of Picasso’s lovers. But to my eyes, it looks like a sphinx—a monster that (like the anamorphic skull haunting Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors) only snaps into focus when viewed from an oblique perspective. To perceive the r…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…Which is to say I can understand NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos’ effort, in defense of Morning Edition’s recent story on “conversion therapy,” to acknowledge the seemingly simple truth that religious and sexual identities at times clash, that such clashes can cause suffering, and that not all people resolve that clash in favor of sexual identity. But, after years of studying and writing about reparative therapy and the ex-gay movement, and…